Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Ok, so I finally finished burning those TDK Dual Layer DVD’s and in the 20 pack, 9 of them where bad. Better average then the Memorex of course, and certainly better then Play-O brand! However, definately not as good as the Sony brand of Dual Layer DVD’s.

So there you have it, very interesting results. Just for referance I have two different brand DVD burners. One is Pioneer and the other is NEC. The NEC is about 3 years old and the Pioneer drive is only about 1 year old.

That should tell you what

Current mood: chipper
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

Ok, so I screwed up, it wasn’t just the fault of Nero. The main problem was the Memorex disks, which….Kids cover your ears….suck donkey ba11$!!!

I found this out after trying that other piece of software I mentioned earlier also with the Memorex disks and it still failed! So I tried Nero again with a Verbatium disk and it worked perfectly. That was when I wrote a scathing letter to the Memorex tech support about the quality of their Dual Layer DVD’s and I gave them all the specs of my system, including the drivers I’m using. The make and model of my DVD burners, and all the other jazz that matters.

They sent an immediate reply offering to replace the Disks, and I couldn’t help but think, “Well that’s nice of them, but I don’t want to replace disks that don’t work with more disks that don’t work.” So I told them off, and took the spindle back to Best Buy and got my refund through them. That’s when I got some Sony Dual Layer DVD’s and some TDK Dual Layer DVD’s. I’ve been testing the Sony DVD’s and I got through a pack of 15 with only one failure, I’m on the last disk now, not sure if it will fail or not.

I will test the TDK’s next. We’ll see what happens….But don’t hold your breath.

On the note of Nero, I still have problems with it, since every time the DVD does fail to burn, Nero will promptly go back and attempt to start the burning process over again, in the process freezing out every other application running in windows. This attempt to reburn the DVD is of course doomed to failure while it sits there like a dumb-shit wondering…”I think I can, I think I can…”. I’ve seen it waste an extra 45 minutes trying to reburn the DVD that just failed. Seems someone was smart the day they programmed that little feature.

Current mood: angry
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

I’m not sure what it is, but something must be wrong with me this week! Seems everything just falls appart all at once. I just hate it when that happens esspecially after dumping so much money into everything nice and new!

I go to get one of those new halogen light bulbs that are supposed to last for ever! I start to screw it into the light socket and bang, it’s dead before I can even get it tested.

That by itself didn’t make me mad, I’m just like, ok next…

So I’ve been working on this computer for around 14 months getting my personal stuff organized and converted to digital formats like mp3 audio, mpeg4 video with VBR audio, and scanning all of the artwork that I’ve made since I was a little kid. Including converting all my Audio tapes to wave files, editing them into individual tracks, remastering them by removing the background hiss so they will again be close to CD quality, then compressing it to mp3 audio.

With all this junk on my hard drive now and fully organized it’s time to back it all up to make sure that all my hard work is not pointless, that I will always have access to these materials from the earlier part of my life in a tight compact electronic format. It means burning all this data onto Dual Layer DVD’s since that’s the best format to use these days for long term storage and large volume backups of digital data.

I’ve burned about 12 of these DVD’s with just mp3’s at 8 gigs each. Actually it was only 4 DVD’s but I burn 3 copies of each after learning the hard way that 1 backup or even 2 backups isn’t always enough to make certain that the data is fully recoverable after several years have gone by. Well today I started to burn the last DVD and it failed to verify. Keep in mind that it takes about an hour and 10 minutes to burn each DVD and then verify all the data on that DVD to make sure it’s not corrupted. So that’s one hour of time in the toilet. So I figure it must just be the physical disk wasn’t any good so I start another one the same thing, another coaster, and another coaster and another coaster. After about 9 of these I’m really starting to get irritated because only one of them actually worked. Keep in mind that these disks also cost money, about $100 for 50 of them.

So finally I really got mad and I decided to stop trying this with Nero and use the built in Windows burner, trouble with that is that the built in Windows disk writer doesn’t support very large format disk burning like DVD’s. Someone at Microsoft…as usual only had enough foresight to program Windows such that it would only burn CD’s of a comparable storage capacity of around 700mb, not 8 gigs! So when I went to actually write the DVD, windows gives a pop-up that says please insert a valid CD for the burning to proceed. The disk you have entered is not a valid format. Even though it has a capacity of 8 gigs, not 700mb.

Yet another example of just how stupid Microsoft is!

So I grabbed another software package, I think it’s called ImgBurn, I built the ISO with Nero, and I’m trying to burn the image file with this other software my friend suggested that I use. It’s working so far, but then again Nero got this far too. It’s the verification that it fails on.

After further examination with the built in windows burner software it was consistantly failing when I would try to drag and drop some of the individual folders over to the drive for burning for no apparent reason at all. The error messages are never very imformative, even for a software engineer. If some of these guys who actually write software would write informative error messages the world would be so much more productive! Now the guys who write GNU tend to do it correctly, why can’t the guys who write GNU software work for Microsoft and teach them how it’s done?!

So this is what I have to say about Nero….

Nero-Shmero

and I would like to add MicroSUCK!….you don’t suck….you blow!

Cheers

Seth